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How Women’s Music Needs an Appalshop
This is a draft of something I wrote for the Oxford American which they rightfully didn’t use but it is a stone on the path of what I’ve been thinking about so taped up here in my studio archive is probably where it belongs. Most importantly, you can learn more about and SUPPORT THE WORK OF THE AMAZING APPALSHOP. Eighty percent of their reels, audio and tapes were affected by the devastating floodwaters of July 2022.
The mission statement of the Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky is on the short the list of the things I admire most. Employing arts to tell stories that commercial cultural industries don’t tell, they challenge stereotypes with Appalachian voices and visions to counter the narrative that makes eastern Kentucky — the birthplace of a legendary amount of country music — the poster child for American poverty. The Appalshop’s fifty years have created one of the richest archives of people contextualizing themselves in existence, a collective of care. When the Appalshop flooded recently, in part due to the mountaintop removal and climate change, it hit me in the gut that the Appalshop has always spoken from a truthful center of the universe about the messy state of the world.
Because of the flood, I didn’t bother the Appalshop about where Skeeter Davis might turn up in the archive, but she tells her Kentucky story herself in her book, Bus Fare To Kentucky. Born in Dry Ridge, Kentucky, northern Kentucky, poverty Kentucky, Skeeter was an outsider in worn-out dresses at a new high until she sang a little harmony with Betty Jack Davis. The two became soulmate sister friends, and pretty quickly, singing stars. The Davis Sisters released “I’ve Forgotten More Than You Will ever Know about Him” in 1953. The song sold a million copies, a number one on country charts and a top twenty pop hit and Chet Atkins, who produced it, was over the moon about how they sang. Their harmony quickly influenced the Everly Brothers (and thus the Beatles), inspired Bud Isaacs to invent the double neck steel and was eventually one of Bob Dylan’s rare covers. Together, Skeeter and Betty drove around the country playing shows and radio appearances with Earnest Tubb, singing their teenage hearts out and going to church every Sunday no matter where they were.
In her autobiography, however, Skeeter remembers something other than hometown pride for the girls — church and community seemed sure Betty and Skeeter ought to be ashamed of whatever it was they were doing driving around alone. The girls, both devoutly religious, bent over backwards to keep and prove prove their decency and virtue. One night, a boy who had a crush on Betty Jack showed up at a tour stop. Had he told people back home he was coming? Oh yes, everybody. OH NO, knew Betty Jack. We can’t stay the night here, we gotta drive home. Nobody would ever believe her innocence if she stayed the night unchaperoned with a suitor in the same town. In the early morning light of the all night drive, Betty Jack was killed in a head on collision. I don’t know why women aren’t told this story on arrival in the music business.
Skeeter Davis went on to have a stunning solo career where she continually topped both the pop and county charts. The sound she made singing harmony with herself created a glassy, rock and roll doubling effect. She toured with the Stones, but wasn’t supposed to say that too loudly in Nashville. Her personal life had the complicated hallmarks of life on the road, and she likened herself more to Waylon and Willie the Outlaws than she did to the Opry. Her career paid tribute to Betty Jack everyday by refusing to replace her.
In her unpublished manuscript uplifting the unsung foremothers of jazz and blues, Rosetta Reitz wrote at length about how often women like Billie Holiday touring the segregated south would find the designated Black women’s bathroom locked on purpose. Spend a little time with your compassionate imagination on segregated touring and whatever white women of country music have experienced doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. The dawn of the recording industry was the birthplace of a segregated musical archive called genre. Country (white) and blues (black) were marketing tactics, not at all a musical construction. And that’s the opposite of the Appalshop, where people tell their own stories to counteract an oversimplification narrative meant to sell. How music and stories and people are archived has consequences.
Women folklorists, archivists, journalists and musical memory keepers have taken notes and raised up women musicians throughout history, and women have carried their musical traditions forward every day, but there’s no place to go pray. Our records are an archive, of course; I listen to Maybelle, Sippie, Odetta, Linda for every trace of the hearts behind the music and the stories they lived. I wish their lives were better documented from a woman’s point of view, especially the ones out of reach of the celebrity, whose contributions are perhaps even more significant to building the road we are on. I wish we had an Appalshop of our own, a place where the experiences of women making music are centered, rather than the musical transaction. Women’s music needs an archive of care. Somewhere beyond the internet cafeteria noise, some midnight library where foremothers feed us wisdom in whispers across time and ephemera, where we are supported by all the stories of pulling in the same direction against the narrow tropes we are offered. The women’s music archive certainly isn’t the radio; women in country are famously the tomatoes in the salad sprinkled into occasional airplay. Our archive isn’t Spotify, where women’s work experiences a new form of erasure as credits, context and fair pay are valued as unnecessary, an autopilot algorithm replaces active listening and playlists about the history of blues include a mere five women of fifty tracks. The music business — made up of predominantly male executives, agents and musicians — is certainly not the place to turn for understanding what being a woman in music is like, but it is where we are most often contextualized.
Songbirds is one of the world’s favorite labels for rootsy women singers. Whatever my work is these days, I’m no fragile bird. If anyone is going to highlight the significant contributions of women speaking for themselves and stories foregrounding the strength and grit of women in music, it’s probably us. I volunteer my kitchen. I’ll train in Whitesburg.
Very informative piece about an unsung heroine of her time. Can't say I'd ever heard of her. My bad.